Record-Setting Prep Pitcher Just Has to Improve on 51-0

You might think that Jon Peters, the record-setting high school pitcher from Brenham, Tex., would be a cinch first-round draft choice. He is 51-0 in his career with a 1.44 earned-run average and 561 strikeouts in 338 1/3 innings. “He’ll be drafted,” Met Vice President Joe McIlvaine said. “But I don’t see him going in the first or second rounds. With high school players, you can throw performance out the window. I mean, obviously this kid has shown he’s a winner. That’s a plus. But with high school kids, you draft on potential, not on performance.

“It reminds me of a story about one kid, Mike Pill, who set the all-time winning record in Southern California, so you’re talking about a lot of very good players. He was something like 33-1. I saw him and didn’t like him. He had a lot of pitches, including a good slider, which you don’t see too often in high school. I thought the kid had peaked. He was just that much more advanced than other high school players. But I thought he wasn’t going to get any better.

“Pittsburgh took a chance on him and drafted him early, in the second round, I think. The kid never got out of ‘A’ ball.”

Add longshots: McIlvaine scouted a game between Texas A&M; and the University of Houston. “The wind was blowing out, there was a short porch in left field and they have the aluminum bat,” McIlvaine said. “I saw something I had never seen before: Texas A&M; had to cut batting practice short because they lost all of their balls over the wall. They had no baseballs left.” Texas A&M; won, 11-10.

Trivia time: The Montreal Canadiens did what 22 times in their six-game series against the Philadelphia Flyers in the Wales Conference finals?

Sign that man up, again: John Wockenfuss, manager of the Toledo Mud Hens, was supposed to manage while his minor league club played an exhibition game against the parent-club Detroit Tigers. Instead, Wockenfuss pitched five shutout innings against the Tigers as the Mud Hens won, 3-1.

Wockenfuss, 40, allowed three hits and a walk in the game’s final five innings. The first-year International League manager was a major league catcher for 10 years but never pitched in his big-league career, which ended with Detroit in 1983.

Not so fast: Houston placed catcher Alan Ashby on waivers this week, just days after he vetoed a trade that would have sent him to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Ashby, a 14-year veteran who was in his 11th season with the Astros, had already loaded his luggage for a team trip to Chicago when he learned of his release from General Manager Bill Wood.

If you don’t have anything nice to say . . . : Philadelphia Flyers owner Ed Snider reportedly wanted to yank announcers Mike Emrick and Bill Clement (both are employed by the Flyers) from SportsChannel America telecasts of his team’s games, saying they were “too objective.”

Trivia answer: Montreal killed all 22 of Philadelphia’s power plays.

Quotebook Dick Schultz, executive director of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn., on the effectiveness of his organization’s drug-testing program: “I’m concerned that we might only be catching the dumb ones when it comes to steroids.”